The Smuggest Man On Air

Aug 28, 2023

Goodbye for now to Tucker Carlson, who punctured the lazy pieties of the media class.

by Lee Harris, Luke Goldstein

April 25, 2023

3:00 PM

Richard Drew/AP Photo

Tucker Carlson poses in a Fox News Channel studio on March 2, 2017, in New York.

Tucker Carlson has left Fox News, just days after the network settled a historic defamation lawsuit with electronic voting machine maker Dominion over its promotion of lies about the 2020 election. The lawsuit surfaced contrasting private and public comments made by Carlson, first rebutting guests’ election denialism and later promoting their views. He also took swipes at Fox News executives in private texts.

The network now faces yet another lawsuit by Abby Grossberg, a former booking producer for Carlson's show, who claims to have been harassed by Carlson and other employees at the network and encouraged to lie during the Dominion case.

The sudden departure meant Carlson didn't get to bid farewell to his audience on Monday, suggesting that he was pushed out of the network. Several media outlets have reported that he was fired.

At the end of his final show, Carlson shared a pizza with a delivery man who made headlines for stopping a carjacking. "These pizza warmers are one of the great wonders of science," said Carlson upon receiving the delivery box. The segment then promoted a new Carlson original called "Let Them Eat Bugs," in which Carlson travels around the country sampling arthropodic delicacies to offend globalist promoters of insect protein.

More from Lee Harris | Luke Goldstein

After starting his career as a fact-checker and magazine columnist, Carlson went on to occupy many roles as a talking head. His style rankled adversaries but often freed up his show to entertain controversial subjects that other mainstream shows wouldn't touch. Carlson's incessant mockery of first lady Jill Biden's insistence on being called "Dr. Biden," for example, bordered on the absurd while subtly exposing an elite obsession with credentials and meritocracy.

Tucker, as his enormous fan following knows him, was adored by viewers and reviled by critics for his signature incredulous stare—the slack-jawed expression he wears when he simply can't believe what he's being told.

That look of smirking disbelief is deliberately theatrical. But Carlson's insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority, frequently making larger-than-life figures of the political establishment defend arguments they otherwise treat as self-evident.

Tucker's willingness to challenge and mock ruling elites went alongside an obsessively nativist message that alienated viewers who might otherwise have embraced his populist perspective. His popularity with a wide audience begs the question why other nightly news shows that attacked him didn't raise the same critiques, without the nativism.

One answer is that Tucker Carlson Tonight was an outlier in corporate-owned cable news, which is typically hostile to independent critiques of executives and political elites. The show declined to play the gatekeeping role that many of Carlson's detractors demand of mainstream media platforms. Carlson hosted heads of state in the same week as fringe characters of both the far left and far right. He tapped into populist insights, cutting through left- and right-wing echo chambers and putting hard questions to corporate executives and members of the political establishment.

Though Carlson spent years as a staunch libertarian, he made a populist turn around the time of Trump's election, rejecting many of the free-market doctrines he’d previously espoused.

Carlson's willingness to challenge and mock ruling elites went alongside an obsessively nativist message that alienated viewers who might otherwise have embraced his populist perspective.

"​​Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it," Tucker said in a typical segment. "Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite."

That passage of his monologue could have been lifted from a stump speech by Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, progressive senators whose views on economic policy Carlson has at times echoed.

Carlson showcased this newfound populist reflex during a 2018 interview with Ben Shapiro, a dogmatic libertarian conservative. In a moment that recently went viral, Carlson clashed with Shapiro about whether the government should be able to restrict trucking companies from adopting autonomous vehicle technology to avoid the social costs of massive job losses in truck driving.

The more fundamental disagreement is whether democracy rules over technology or vice versa, a debate that can be extended to artificial intelligence, social media regulation, and other hot-button areas of disagreement between free-marketeers and populists. Carlson was emphatic that a self-determining polity should be able to control its technological destiny, while Shapiro dithered about government overreach in the market.

"Are you joking?" Carlson responded when asked by Shapiro if he’d ban autonomous vehicles. "In a second."

Carlson often hosted segments focused on Big Tech with guests calling for the breakup of Silicon Valley giants and increased antitrust enforcement. He's been a frequent critic of trade policies that offshore jobs, a position that's found an unlikely ally in the Biden administration. His 2019 story on how hedge fund manager Paul Singer orchestrated a merger of Cabela and Bass Pro Shops that destroyed a town in Nebraska had few equals in broadcast news as a critique of financialization's impact on neighborhoods and local business.

In the past year, Carlson also broke with the Washington political establishment to express skepticism about the U.S. sending tens of billions of dollars in weapons and security assistance to Ukraine. He has questioned the prevailing insistence that the war "is not a proxy battle between superpowers" and that the United States is not at war with Russia. The television host censured the Biden administration after comments made by the president that indicated the goal of U.S. involvement in Ukraine was regime change, which White House spokespeople then had to walk back.

Carlson repeatedly invited on independent journalists and commentators critical of American military adventurism. Political commentator Jimmy Dore told Fox News viewers, "Your enemy is not China. Your enemy is not Russia. Your enemy is the military-industrial complex."

While Carlson largely dedicated his show to criticizing Democratic lawmakers, he also excoriated the failures of Republican leadership. In one recent instance, Carlson aimed his signature incredulity at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's comment that "the most important thing going on in the world right now is the war in Ukraine."

"No, the most important thing going on in the world right now is the state of your country, the one you’re supposed to run, the people you’re supposed to represent, whose lives are supposed to care about, the ones who can't buy food or gas, the people overdosing on fentanyl," he said.

Liberal media outlets like The Guardian scolded Carlson for his coverage of the Ukraine conflict, demanding to know who the host was really "rooting for." A chorus of op-eds on Monday cheered his ouster and the move to rescue his "very impressionable audience" from "dangerous rhetoric." But cable news may struggle to find an entertainer equally skilled at skewering comfortable pieties on the left and right.

For a partial list of Tucker's noxious comments, see Mother Jones, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others.

Lee Harris is a staff writer at The American Prospect. In 2020, she co-founded New York Focus, an investigative news site on New York politics. Prior to that, she was editor of the independent newspaper at the University of Chicago.

Luke Goldstein is a writing fellow at The American Prospect.

April 25, 2023

3:00 PM

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